Mike Perera, vice president of IBM z Systems Software, says the z Systems for Cloud with Operational Insights and Hybrid Application Performance Management are intended to make it simpler for IT organizations to manage hybrid cloud computing environments that include z/OS or one of the variants of Linux that IBM now supports on the mainframe. As part of that effort, IBM will make the data it collects accessible to third-party applications via a well-defined application programming interface, says Perera.

Perera notes that, given the fact that about half of all data will continue to run on premise cloud, computing by definition is going to be hybrid.

“We think about 45 percent of all data will continue to run on premise,” says Perera.

To make it easier to manage that data, IBM today also unveiled IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management, which is designed to make it easier to manage multiple copies of the same data. IBM also moved to extend its IBM Spectrum data protection capability to include object-based storage.

Finally, IBM announced various extensions to alliances with third-party partners including Canonical, Red Hat, Mirantis, NGINX and Hortonworks that are all intended to extend the open source appeal of IBM Power Systems as an alternative to Intel x86 server platforms; the effort was further enhanced with the announcement that The Clearing House will be building a new national payment system in the U.S. on top of Power8-based IT infrastructure.

Over time, Perera says, the major challenge IT organizations will face is figuring out how to holistically manage data regardless of where it resides. As such, Perera says, it only makes sense for IBM to use the cloud to open up the wealth of information it has about data residing on mainframes to a wide variety of third-party hybrid cloud management applications.

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